


the lost are like this

by althusserarien (ArmchairElvis)



Category: Mary Russell - Laurie R. King, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mental Health Issues, References to Abuse, References to Homophobia, Suicide Attempt, The Final Problem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 02:12:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArmchairElvis/pseuds/althusserarien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>But of course there are always <span class="u">reasons</span>.</i> It takes Mary Russell many years to understand Sherlock Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the lost are like this

**Author's Note:**

> This fic carries a strong trigger warning for mental illness, attempted suicide, and general gloominess. I shower [nomad1328](http://archiveofourown.org/users/nomad1328/pseuds/nomad1328) with my most effusive thanks for her excellent beta services.
> 
> This fic is an AU to the Laurie R. King books in the same way that those books can be considered an AU to the canon. I wanted to explore some of the things that bothered me about the books, at the same time as I explored what a Holmes/Watson relationship would be like in this universe. This is a different Holmes, more unstable, but I think these things are hinted at in the canon, and I wanted to play those references up, not down.

At first, Russell finds Holmes’ relationship with Watson puzzling. She’s read the stories. A small, ineffectual man, she thinks. Frequently dim, sometimes stupid, occasionally insightful.

But she is fifteen and she is wounded and parentless and she hates Watson, for what he represents. Because what little regard Holmes has apportioned out to his fellow human beings, he has given to Watson, unwaveringly and unconditionally.

This is before she learns that men can know each other from the inside out without ever having to give a name to the thing that they share. Before she learns how completely stories can lie, how the dream world they conjure up begs to be more real than blood and skin and bone.

The Holmes she knows first has grey hair and a lined, mournful face. Two fingers on his right hand are nicotine-stained to the first joint. He has a way of looking at you, like he knows your thoughts without knowing your heart, and when he sets out across the Sussex Downs he walks fast, like his feet still want slippery cobblestones, not grass and soil. Red blotches show on the back of his hands, fresh bee stings. You build up tolerance over time, he tells her. Sometimes he rolls down his sleeves when she comes into the room, with a quick practiced gesture, but she is young, so she doesn’t know what that means.

In her mind's eye she has conjured up a picture of Watson: a caricature of a fat buffoon with a drooping moustache and a polite, diffident smile.

She has seen the pictures from the Strand stories, too. A bland mustachioed gentleman, a haughty man with Holmes’ severe profile but not his hairline nor the white two-inch scar along the right side of his jaw. A sovereign ring, he tells her. When I was done with him I heard tell that he walked with a limp for six months.

Watson was right about his hands. They are the most animated part of him, darting in and out of his hip pocket, rolling a cigarette, winding his watch. Picking a left-handed fingering pattern out on the cool glass surface of a shop counter, like he can hear it.

...

There is a photograph on the top shelf of the bookcase, Holmes formally posed next to a man half a head shorter than he. Holmes' neck emerges from a stiff formal collar looking awkwardly, painfully thin. The other man's face is slightly turned to the side. Half-smiling, his skin is darker than Holmes', the lines around his mouth deeper. They look comfortable next to each other.

“The year after I moved in to Baker Street I helped a photographer sort out a family problem. He offered to pay me by way of a portrait, so I dragged Watson over there. He was very pleased by the result. I look like a skeleton.”

“This is Watson? How old were you, Holmes? You look...”

Holmes takes the photograph down from the shelf, where it rests next to a half-disassembled revolver that would be of more interest to an antique dealer than a gunman. He smiles faintly.

“I was 22 here, Watson 24. I look like an overgrown child. Watson liked it, which is why I kept it, I suppose. Nothing else about the whole ghastly process remotely pleased me.”

Russell doesn't know what to say, so she takes a closer look at the faces in the photo. Holmes' eyes are clear and faultless, stark against his pale, thin face. The hands clasped on his knees are blurred slightly, as if they were moving when the photo was taken. He isn’t smiling.

Russell can see why Holmes was not happy with this photo, aside from the fact that it was clearly taken before he undertook any physical training. Watson appears comfortable in his own skin, Holmes does not.

It never seemed quite real to her, all those years of hansom cabs and loaded revolvers and a fog that never seemed to lift. That is what Holmes tells her of the last winter he spent in Baker Street: It seemed so crowded and so cold. I felt I needed to escape the fog, escape the noise of drunks calling at night and cabs rattling by during the day. It wasn’t conducive to clear thought.

Fog, she thinks. Fog, this nervous man with eyes that want to cut through you. She can see him pacing the carpet bare, stifled, trapped in those two rooms in NW1. Oh yes, she can see him, with his cold remote face and his nervous hands. Of course he didn’t like the photograph. It is so telling.

Russell has found herself cataloguing Holmes, classifying him. The writing callus on his right hand. The slight curve to his upper lip. The way he crosses his legs at the ankle when he stretches out in the worn basket chair by the fire, the shape of his bony shoulders in shirtsleeves. It is not like love. There is nobody else, no one else in the sterile life she shares with her hateful aunt, nobody else she can admire.

Holmes puts the picture back on the shelf. He goes back to his desk, at the other side of the room, and buries his head in the newspaper. The house is dark, and it smells cleanly of books and honey and smoke. Russell realises not for the first time that men like Holmes will tell their lives to you in half-remembered details and stories, in a strange smell in a dark room or a face in shadow.

Years later, half drunk, in the endless empty hours that crawl by as they wait for the milk train to take them back to Eastbourne, he will tell her about Moriarty. He was called back to the village, and I went on alone, Holmes will say. When I met _him_ on the path I knew that I’d made the right decision. Russell cannot imagine the Watson Holmes speaks of blithely walking off to leave Holmes to his death.

There is a quiet, matter-of-fact sort of pride in Holmes voice, when he speaks of Watson. She wishes that it didn’t hurt her.

...

“Do you remember what I said to you the day we met, Holmes?”

“As I recall, the first thing you said was _Oh, bugger!_ ” His voice is guarded.

“No, about--”

“--You deduced that my relationship with my parents was not a comfortable one, because I keep their photograph on a shelf next to my desk. It follows, since I keep this photograph of myself and Watson so openly displayed, on a higher shelf, that my relationship with him is less mysterious to me. Or that I have _come to terms with it_ , to use such a vulgar and modern phrase.”

She is surprised by the bitterness in his voice when he speaks this last. It is where Russell would put a photograph of her brother, if she had such a photograph. She does not. She kept nothing.

“Something like that.”

Holmes smiles faintly.

“You were wrong, by the way. I have spoken to Watson about my family. How's your Ancient Greek?”

“Wanting. I learnt it for a year, before I... came here.”

“The Greeks had many words for love where English has only one.”

Russell knows that. But she is young, so she does not understand.

“But of course you have no concern for such things, considering love to be an emotion that clouds the senses, like grit in a fine instrument.”

“Indeed.” And Holmes turns a page in the paper, then lies it down on his knee to light his pipe, the sulphurous flash of smoke casting his features into sharp relief, his face closed off to her.

She’s three pages into the book she was looking for when he speaks again.

“I have always felt that to be true,” he says, and she waits for him to wait something more, and the house is so silent that she can hear the waves grating against the cliffs half a mile away.

...

It is high summer, and men are dying in the mud less than two hundred miles away across the channel, but the village slumbers in a haze of soggy hayfields and cider presses. Russell grits her teeth against her aunt’s stoic disapproval, laces her father’s shoes, and sets out alongside the fence of her north field.

The main room of Holmes cottage smells, as always, of beeswax and tobacco and books. The floor is cool under her stocking feet, and she is suddenly aware of her height, her awkwardness, the shabbiness of her clothes. Watson and Holmes are standing together by the tall windows, their shoulders touching, the smoke from Holmes’ pipe almost blue in the shafts of light streaming in the window. They both seem so still.

There is a swell of pride in her chest when Holmes formally introduces her to Watson with the sort of quiet respect accorded to friends. Holmes has engaged Watson in a very complicated discussion about one of his lab experiments. It is less a conversation than a lecture, actually, and Russell is taken aback by the enthusiasm in Holmes' voice. He does not often sound like this, not in her experience. She is sixteen. She has known him for six months.

Holmes sweeps upstairs, muttering something about samples, borne into the laboratory on the cresting wave of his own arcane interests. Watson raises his eyebrows, then sits in the worn basket chair next to the round window. He takes out a cigarette, places his cigarette case back into his pocket, and strikes a vesta on his boot sole with the same hand. Soft leather creased at the base of the toes, dried grass. Walks a lot.

“Such energy,” he says, his voice indulgent. He flicks the burnt match casually into the fireplace. “Anyone would think he was discussing something more important than rapid-drying plaster.”

“Turkish blend,” Russell says. “Machine-rolled by a tobacconist in London. Holmes and I have been learning about tobaccos.”

“I see,” Watson says, and he grins widely, knowingly, as if he is being presented with the punchline for some private joke. “Does Holmes still have that infernal ash collection? I was glad to see the last of those soggy old cheroots borne out my door, let me tell you.”

Russell nods, uncertain. She was not expecting this.

“You’ve also been devoting a lot of time to the famous fast-drying plaster formula.”

“Yes.”

Watson smiles again, and takes a short drag on his cigarette. There is a sort of quiet, self-contained quality to him.

“Was Holmes like this when you lived at Baker Street?”

“Sometimes,” Watson says, his voice level. “No doubt he’s devoting so much time and energy to such a mundane occupation because he feels he should be doing more. He’s always been that way.”

“More?”

“For the war,” Watson says.

Russell is suddenly keenly aware of her youth, of the fact that young men with the misfortune of being born twenty months before her are dying in their masses for dear old Blighty, coming back in pieces. Rolling bandages doesn’t seem like much.

Watson's shoulders are broader than Holmes', although Holmes is perhaps five inches taller than he. He has a smudge of ink on the middle finger of his right hand. Writing a note on the train. When he turns his head to look out the window, taking in the view of the garden, Russell can see four or five white pockmarked scars spread over the left side of his neck, at the collar line.

For a long moment, the time it takes to draw breath, Russell's internal vision is dominated by a few vivid images: a younger version of the man before her leaning over a stretcher, then turning his head slightly to one side as he is struck in the left shoulder. The same man being thrown over a pack-horse, blood dripping down his left arm. Submitting to battlefield surgery to extract a lump of misshapen metal and fragments of shattered scapula. Russell's stomach clenches. She curls her right hand into a fist in her pocket.

Watson turns away from the window. "Holmes tells me that he has taken you on as an apprentice of sorts.”

That same bright gleam of pride blooms in Russell's chest. Apprentice? “I've seen a great deal of him in the last few months.”

“Mmm,” says Watson. "Holmes' knowledge of anatomy is entirely unsystematic, except for pressure points. Would you care to know the mechanism by which the hand is clenched and unclenched?"

A doctor, she thinks. He has seen my injury in the way I carry myself, just as I read his in him.

Five minutes later Holmes is back downstairs, wearing a waistcoat that does not match his trousers, and carrying a cardboard box full of boot-print impressions.

"Come, Watson, I want to show you the footprints I made on the path. And while we're walking over there, Mary, you can tell me about Watson's accent."

Russell likes to present information to herself in an orderly fashion.

John Watson: fairly athletic, tireless walker, slightly arthritic knees. Boxed at one point, obvious in the way he carries himself. Left arm has a limited range of motion and less strength than the right, an old injury that he for the most part is indifferent to. Scottish parents or parent, raised in England, attended a minor public school.

As they are walking down the path Watson puts his hand on Holmes’ shoulder, squeezes it for a second, and lets his hand fall softly back down to his side. They walk side by side, Holmes always at Watson’s right.

When they are sitting outside on the terrace Watson takes a dented silver cigarette case out of his pocket (the lid is elaborately engraved with the initials SWH) and places a cigarette between his lips. It's windy. He raises his eyebrows slightly and Holmes reaches forward to light the cigarette that Watson cups with his right hand. It's a movement so smooth it might have been done a hundred times.

Watson blows out a quick stream of smoke and says "I'd like to see you half a stone heavier, Holmes."

"I could say the same for you, Watson, except that I'd like to see you a stone lighter." Holmes' voice is high and irritated, but Watson smiles into his tea.

...

“Forgive me for my indiscretion earlier,” Watson says to Russell as they walk back up to the cottage, along the edge of Holmes’ apiary.

“There was no indiscretion. You obviously care about your friend, Dr. Watson.” Russell watches Watson as he stares in Holmes’ direction, glances dubiously at the closest beehive.

“I’m-- I’m sure he’ll get himself into some sort of... _state_ , convincing the government he’s fit enough to go into the field on some vile espionage mission. He had pneumonia last year.”

The light is fading, and Russell can smell the warm sweet smell of the beehives. Holmes is in the shed collecting a jar of honey for Watson to take back to London. It seems so _unreal_ for a second, that Watson is confiding in her, delicately rumbling away to her about Holmes’ health, which so far as she knows is robust.

“I’m sure if he thinks the work is too taxing he’ll say so,” Russell says. “He can’t work in a hospital like you.”

“No.”

They walk a little further, then Russell speaks again. “I have never known him to lie.”

A warm chuckle. Then: “I have, on innumerable occasions. Not the least monstrous of which being _no, I am not using cocaine again_ , followed of course by _I wouldn’t lie to you, Watson_.”

Oh, Russell thinks.

...

They all troop out to the front of the cottage to see Watson off, Mrs. Hudson handing him a plate of scones with a tea towel draped over it.

“My talents are un-appreciated here,” she says, and Holmes laughs heartily. His is a strange laugh, and often unsettling in its intensity.

“You are in too high spirits, Holmes,” Watson says. “I know you’re planning something.”

“I am planning to split one of my hives and write a treatise on footprint analysis,” Holmes says, his voice bland. “That’s all.”

Watson scowls, smooths down his moustache with a nervous hand. “Please, Holmes, I have business to attend to in London and I do not wish to go down to bloody Surrey or Glasgow in a hurry.”

“Oh, remember Trieste?” Holmes says, his eyes twinkling. Watson scowls again.

“I want to say look after him, Miss Russell, but you’re too young. Just don’t let this impulsive, infuriating man get you into any trouble. You’ll be knee-deep in mud in some field somewhere freezing in the dead of night, and he’ll be whistling a Mozart concerto. Good day, Holmes.”

Then he waves and drives off and toots the horn of his motorcar, in a merry way that is kind of jarring, and Holmes stands outside smoking until the car reaches the corner, almost as if he is conducting a small private ritual.

...

"I suppose you should know that I was prepared to hate him, Holmes." Mary stands at the window, in the same place Watson was ten hours earlier.

Holmes' face goes rigid, and he turns, a sheaf of handwritten notes forgotten in his hand.

"Why?"

"Because the stories--"

Holmes gives a high, bitter laugh. "Stories are stories, Russell."

"Indeed."

Holmes puts his back to his desk, his arms crossed. "You were expecting an imbecile? A doddering, fat old fool?"

"One could say that."

Holmes shakes his head. There is a short, loaded silence, Russell dreadfully certain that she has overstepped the mark.

"Watson has made sacrifices you do not know of, Russell."

Holmes turns back to his desk, letting those words hang heavy in the air. Russell does not say anything for a long time.

It is not until she is walking home in the cool of the evening that Russell sees again in her mind's eye Watson's silver cigarette case. Holmes' initials. A souvenir left atop a boulder in Switzerland, Holmes' last words.

Two days pass and Holmes disappears, leaving a terse note but no forwarding address. When he comes back he has a dry, nagging cough, a pocket full of American cigarettes, and no overcoat. He sends a lot of telegrams to and from London, and goes for long walks out on the coast, at night.

Even at her age, there are things she longs to tell him. Stop fighting it, this war is larger than you or I, and you cannot stop young lives from being thrown away. They will throw your life away, too.

The next time Watson comes to visit he asks Russell several terse and probing questions about Holmes’ health, and seems to go away unsatisfied. There is much she does not understand, much she does not wish to understand. Her Holmes is still the man of the stories, a man who existed in a universe free of true addictions, free of unnecessary attachments.

...

Holmes goes away to London to help the police with a kidnapping case, and when Russell begs to come he says “Certainly not, you’re not ready.” Sixteen.

He sends her cryptic telegrams and letters full of vitriolic comments about the police and his own progress on the case, and by the time the newspaper reports that the child has been found, unharmed, she realises that she hasn’t heard from Holmes in two full days.

Three days later she drops by on a Saturday morning to “help” Mrs. Hudson with the baking and finds Holmes on the settee downstairs, lying there in grimy shirtsleeves, with red-rimmed eyes that seem glazed and vacant, and a darkening bruise on one cheek. Watson stomps down the stairs, angrier than she has ever seen him, and he greets Russell vaguely before he puts a clean pair of pyjamas down on Holmes’ chest, roughly. Mrs. Hudson shoos Russell into the kitchen.

“Dr. Watson accompanied Mr. Holmes back from London last night, and he’s been in a foul mood since, Mary. Best not to go in there.”

She launches into a detailed story about a week-long feud the men had when they were living in Baker Street, which started with Holmes’ habit of storing his pipe dottles on the mantlepiece and ended with Watson throwing Mrs. Hudson’s second-best butter dish at his head.

The scones are rising in the oven, no thanks to Russell, when she hears Holmes say something in his lazy, insolent drawl, before Watson’s voice cuts in, low and angry. The argument goes on, and Russell decides to go for a walk to the apiary when she hears Watson’s voice, strident and unmistakably clear: _I have had twenty-five years of this, Holmes_. It feels like a burden, hearing this, knowing this.

...

When Watson helps Holmes up the stairs he can feel the heat coming through his skin, sick and feverish. It is always like this. My mind is like a racing engine, he told Watson once. But his body is like that, too. Nicotine and coffee and lack of sleep. In the bath at Baker Street, collarbone jutting like a child’s, the scars on his ribs. Lying back on the single bed, legs bunched up at the end, teeth glinting in the dark. His hands, searching for Watson in the dark, consuming him by touch. And then the cocaine, tearing something ragged at the centre of him, filling the empty spaces. Living all of this, over and over again.

Watson remembers him pacing back and forth across the sitting room in Baker Street, thirty-five and driven half-mad not by a case but by the lack of one, babbling, his shoulders tight, his fists clenched.

He turns back the covers and helps Holmes in, one hand at his bony elbow, and then he stands at the window and lets out a breath, soft. The moon is almost full and Holmes’ beehives look grey in the watery light. Watson crosses his arms and pushes his anger down into a sour little ball at the base of his stomach, tries to forget it. He thinks of London, thinks of nothing, thinks of yesterday’s paper, half-read and stuffed into his briefcase downstairs. Holmes’ trembling hands, on the train back home. The way Holmes put his hand to the side of Watson’s face, in the fragile privacy of the train carriage. Shhh, he said. Shhhh, Watson, forget everything, forget the man in the corridor, he won’t walk by. Come back. Come here. Their lovemaking restless and frantic, and always Holmes’ blank insatiable _need_ for something else, a need that neither narcotics or love will ever palliate.

“I’m sorry,” Holmes says, one thin arm over his eyes.

 _You are always sorry_ , Watson thinks, _and so am I_.

“I’m sorry I said that, Holmes.”

“Please, Watson. Just come to bed.”

Watson takes off his trousers and his socks, then shrugs off his jacket, carefully unbuttoning his shirt. He leaves his singlet and underpants on, because it’s cold, because he is still angry and he wants this thin barrier between himself and Holmes, because he is cold and angry and tired. Oh, Holmes, he thinks. Just let yourself be loved.

Holmes curls himself against Watson, and after a short while he goes to sleep. Watson thinks of the two of them in Baker Street, at twenty-five or thirty, young and invulnerable, of how he once thought he could map Holmes’ body but never find the way to his heart.

...

She is seventeen and she is walking with Watson, down the road toward the village. It is still morning, far too early for Holmes, and the air is cool.

Watson has just read an article on Mendelian inheritance, and it excites him greatly. Genetic bodies known as chromosomes carry messages of heritability from both the mother and the father, he says. Each of the myriad factors involved in identity and personality and physicality -- illness, intelligence, eye colour -- could one day be linked to this substance, which carries its mysterious message in every cell of the body. When Watson is like this he has more patience than Holmes. He goes back and explains things.

“I feel that training has contributed just as much as heritability in my case,” Russell says. She thinks of her father, of his mind, his capacity for languages. Of her mother’s Hebrew lessons.

“Holmes would scoff at this conversation,” Watson says. “He hated the idea of being related to his father, of sharing blood with him, of inheriting.”

“I never knew my father long enough,” Russell says. She tells Watson a little about her father, about his business, the work he was doing for the army. Watson’s father was an army officer. It’s funny how the ache of it never goes away, she wants to tell him. How you can be jealous of people who blithely mention their fathers.

They turn around and walk into the bright morning sun, and Watson lights a cigarette, fumbling a little with the match, turning his head away from the wind.

“They say now that violent events and disruptions in early childhood can affect the emotional development of the adult. I often think about this, when I look at Holmes.”

“How so, Watson?” Silence for several steps, the delicious sweetness of the morning air, woodsmoke on the breeze.

“Holmes’ father was very violent. I do not know if you could call it unduly so, although Holmes certainly thinks so. He was certainly cruel.” Watson opens his mouth as if he is going to say more, then doesn’t.

But of course there are always _reasons_. After a while there are no reasons, only needs, only questions. Nature abhors a vacuum and sometimes there is too much noise in his head, too many wide open spaces that he needs to fill. This is how Russell understands it, when she thinks of it. She is seventeen, she has not yet seen him at his worst.

...

The smallest action can give a man away, Holmes tells her. From the way he lights his cigarette to the way he ties his shoelaces. The way she folds her handkerchief, the way she holds a newspaper in front of her.

On the train into London, he tells her to watch the people on the train platform. He leans close and murmurs into her ear, and she can smell the starched soapy smell of his shirt, tobacco.

“He met her at the station in his best clothes but he saved money on a cab by walking at least half a mile before he got there. He wants to impress her.”

He tells her about the calluses that appear on the fingers of those who play string instruments, the red mark that some violinists have on the left side of their neck. The hands of hansom cab drivers and the fingers of people who write in shorthand.

But all this is rehearsal, of course. Parlour games. Holmes has spent most of his life dealing in a different sort of currency: splatter marks and ransom notes and the stories that bruises tell. Violence.

Holmes takes himself for long swims in the ocean, fighting the current. He practices singlestick and leaves bulletholes in the plaster. He works himself too hard, Mrs. Hudson laments to Russell. He locks himself in his laboratory for hours and brews vile black coffee on the spirit stove at 8 p.m., sleeps for sixteen hours.

What do fears tell her about a man? Recklessness? That the thing he came here to escape still weighs on his mind. That perhaps more than death he fears being captured, being beaten, being _found_. He has spent his life mindful of the criminal capacity for retribution, mindful that part of his life has been lived in secret. Russell begins to spend more time with Holmes than she does at her aunt’s, and she sees this now.

For her eighteenth birthday he presents her with a set of lockpicks, and is not until the next day that she finds the scrap of notepaper tucked into the case. Thank you, it says. Of all the things he could have said to her, she was not expecting this.

...

Before Russell goes up to Oxford, Mrs. Hudson takes her out into the small sunny yard formed by the back of the kitchen and the garden wall, puts a mug of strong white tea into her hands.

“It’s been easy for you, in a way, being out here in this small community. People know you’re with Holmes, Mary, and they let you be. But I want you to watch yourself, out there. Don’t let them talk down to you because you’re a woman. Don’t let them talk over you. If you’re in the room when they make an indecent joke, or if they look you up and down, you just look them right in the eye. I am here, you think to yourself. I will not leave. Make them squirm.”

“Thank you,” Russell says. “I -- thank you.”

“There’s nobody else here who’ll tell you these things, Mary. I had to learn it for myself.”

Russell takes a sip of tea, feels the sun on her face. “His housekeeper.”

“Oh, that’s one of Mr. Doyle’s inventions, dear,” Mrs. Hudson murmurs softly. “But if I told you what else I am, I’d have to kill you.”

And then she goes back indoors, a strong, small woman in worn leather walking shoes and a white apron, and Russell takes a sip of the tea and realises it has brandy in it, listens to the faint noises of her moving about in the kitchen.

...

Russell finally understands what Watson meant. Holmes is away in London, and she has not heard of him in _some time_ and is thinking of sending a note to Mrs. Hudson. She is in front of the radiator in her dressing gown when a full rate telegram comes. RUSSELL PLEASE COME AT ONCE. She dresses quickly, crinkling the flimsy into her pocket.

On the last train to London, her fingers numb with cold, she takes it out and reads it again. Full of diversions and embellishments, it is two run on sentences.

She finally tracks down the great Sherlock Holmes at a boarding house in Lambeth. He has a week’s worth of French newspapers and somebody else’s coat and there is a strange, biting chemical smell in the room, which is bitterly cold and empty of everything but a rust-stained washbasin and a single bed with a broken back. And newspapers and papers and telegram flimsies, which litter the floor, wet and trodden-on, like autumn leaves.

“Why did you ask me to come?” Russell says. His eyes are red-rimmed, shining, white and round in the terrible dimness of the room. She doesn’t want to be here. She wants the other Holmes, the man who tramples flowerbeds and always brings his queen out too early but who always manages to win, anyway, with a sort of twisting smile on his face.

“Because I didn’t know how to stop,” he says, and he pulls on the overcoat, which is a couple of inches too short in the arms, and takes a sheaf of notes out of the pocket.

It isn’t that he isn’t making any sense, but it’s hard to make it out through the suffocating tide of everything he says. And it seems suffocating to her, so what must it be like for him? You came on the last train, he tells her. I could tell by the landlord’s shoes that he had corns and by the talcum powder on his cuff that his wife was minding his daughter’s baby. And six horse-drawn hansom cabs went by outside and I could hear the train rattling over the points at London Necropolis, and he goes on and on and she thinks, surely you mean Waterloo, they moved London Necropolis over twenty years ago.

She takes him outside into the smoke, the twisting grey fog. Watches, swallowing hard, as the world’s foremost criminal detection expert retches behind a rubbish pile, and then she leads him down the street and takes him to an all-night cafe and buys him a cup of tea and a plate of eggs, because she doesn’t know what else to do and she wants Watson and she’s afraid for Holmes, for both of them. You made me do this, she thinks. You have done this to yourself and I am nineteen and I am studying chemistry and you have put me in this situation, you insufferable man.

What is it that makes you do this? Tell me, Holmes, I want to know. I would fix it if I could.

“Tell me again, Holmes, why you sent for me,” she says, speaking softly because his voice is loud and people are looking around. “I want to understand.”

“It’s time I told you about a woman I’ve been watching,” he tells her. “I believe that we’re both in danger,” and he reaches into his pocket and takes out his tobacco pouch and she sees that it’s empty, his hands trembling, and he laughs.

Russell waits outside a pub in a grimy street with an open drain while Holmes cajoles the barman into selling him a bottle of brandy or scotch or gin, and Russell thinks, I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be back at home in America with two parents still living. I’m supposed to be in Oxford. I’m supposed to be at home with my father’s fortune. I am an amateur here, with this.

I’ve been sleeping with a revolver beneath the pillow, he tells her, while they both shiver in the cold on a train station. I believe that he had a daughter and that the daughter wishes to destroy me. She would have changed her name. She knows things about me. Anger, hate, it would have twisted her. She knows things.

This isn’t real, Russell thinks. This is the man from a serial novel. Half of London knows things about you, you’ve been raving among them for half the night.

“He?” she says.

“Moriarty,” Holmes murmurs, and that’s when he tells her about everything, about the way Watson stretched his shoulders back as he walked away, as if he was trying to shake off some small private anxiety. She knows Watson from the inside out, she realises, the way you know a lover from the way they cough or the way they walk toward you in the dark.

“She will come after us, Russell,” he says. “I’ve drawn her out, now.” Holmes, she thinks, what else have you been doing in the city, alone in that terrible room?

When they’re walking back from the station to Holmes cottage he says, his voice soft, “I must thank you for your understanding, Russell. I would have suffocated under Watson’s infernal ministrations. He doesn’t understand this.”

Holmes falls into bed and sleeps for eighteen hours, and she sleeps too, and when she wakes she writes Holmes a long, angry note. I am not Watson, she says. Don’t use me. She crumples it up and leaves it in the wastepaper basket, knowing that Holmes will find it if he wants to, and she leaves without saying goodbye.

Russell is seeing a young man, in Oxford. He is quiet, and brilliant, and his father is a distinguished physician with a large house in Kensington and a crop of elegantly-proportioned children. When he asks her about her family she says “My mother and father died and I inherited. I have family in Sussex,” and she thinks of Holmes and only Holmes.

Three weeks later they’re on the run, they’re the hunted, not the hunter, and Holmes has a cold gleam in his eye, completely in control. We’ll draw her to ground, he says, and then we’ll turn on her.

...

“I don’t mean to kill you,” Patricia Donleavy -- Patricia Moriarty -- says, her voice low, shakier than she intends it to be. “I want to destroy you.”

Russell turns to Holmes, in the stuffy silence of the laboratory. He clenches his jaw.

“You were not expecting me. It is so _gratifying_ to surprise you, Sherlock Holmes. I only wish Dr. Watson were here.”

“Dr. Watson is in London. He knows nothing of this.”

“You are protecting him.”

“Until I know what this is about, you will hear nothing about Dr. Watson. I will not involve him.”

Russell breathes softly, deeply. She wants to be ready.

“You didn’t kill my father in self-defence,” Donleavy says, the revolver shaking slightly in her hand. Pain has etched deep lines on her face, since Russell saw her last.

Holmes is silent. He has a strange look on his face, very strange. Russell can see his hands twitch slightly at his side, but apart from that, nothing.

“I know a lot about you, Sherlock Holmes. I know of the bolt-holes you keep in London. I know why Mrs. Hudson’s son left for Australia with such alacrity. I know about the cocaine, the morphine.”

“The whole world knows of those things, thanks to Watson.”

“I know about the two weeks you spent in hospital in 1903. I know that Dr. Watson was called for, that your brother came. I know--”

Holmes breathes in, sharply. That is all.

She puts her head back and laughs. “Ah, that got you, didn’t it?”

“Either your father died or I did. It was that simple. I spent much of my thirties and most of my twenties preparing for such a moment. In such a situation only the first five seconds matters.”

“But you wanted him to die.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Because he knew things about you.”

“Because he was a bad man.”

“And what are you, Sherlock Holmes? If you had had a revolver in your hand, would you have shot my father through the heart, as I long to do to you?”

“Yes.”

“What are you, Sherlock Holmes?”

“I am a man, nothing more.”

“Are you a good man?”

“I have never willingly participated in the destruction of lives for profit. That is what your father did.”

She glances at the revolver in her hand, as if inviting Holmes to speak further, reminding him that she is in control.

“He killed people, _Patricia Donleavy_. Why is it that you don’t bear his name, here in this room where we have no secrets from each other? Torture, prostitution, drugs. Dead men lying face-down in the gutter, stripped of their identity. Destroyed lives. And all the while you sat at home with your mother in a nice house in Kensington, and your father came home every day, and you could convince yourself that he was a good man.”

“And you _killed him_ ,” Donleavy says, and she swivels the gun slightly and pulls the trigger. Broken glass, a chemical smell, a sting in Russell’s side, numb at first. She does not dare to look at Holmes. She stares straight ahead, and the blood runs down her side.

“Never doubt that I am in complete control,” she says. “I could have killed you just now. Just as you did him. You acted as judge, jury and executioner. You killed him, because you were afraid that he would uncover you, as a pervert and a madman.”

“There are no secrets, here,” Holmes says. “I am not ashamed. I will not be ashamed.”

“You were nothing but a pair of--”

“No,” Holmes says, staring past the gun and into her eyes. “I will not hear those words, not now, not from you. Not with what your father did.”

“You are a bold man to say that, with a gun pointed at you.”

“If you were going to kill me you would have done it,” Holmes whispers. “You’ve got a _plan_ , haven’t you?”

Use your hate, he told Russell once. Anger does not help your judgement, but hate does.

She wants Holmes to sign a letter. A masterful piece of work, it is. It makes him out to be a paranoiac, a liar, a man with a secret shame that he will only hint at. Titillating, shameful, weaselly. It is a newspaperman’s dream.

“You will sign this,” she says. “And then you will prepare yourself a final, fatal shot of morphine and take it. I will let Miss Russell go. It will appear to be a suicide, that you were despondent over the web of lies you had built around herself. If you do not cooperate, I will kill her too. It will be a murder-suicide. Then I’ll go for Dr. Watson. Sign it, and they will both be unharmed.”

“This is a work of fiction,” Holmes says. “You will not let her go.”

“And like most good works of fiction, it has a solid grounding in fact. You are a brilliant man, and a dangerous man. You are unstable. You have secrets. I have always kept my word, have I not?”

Holmes is so still, and she can hear the dull, rough edge in his voice. Anger.

“I wonder if you realise how hard it is, to succeed despite things, to incorporate them into yourself because you cannot change, to be a person with eccentricities instead of a madman with a personality. You will never understand, Patricia Moriarty, and you do not deserve my explanations. Your father was a small, broken man, at the end, and he went gladly to his death.”

“No, I will not--”

“Professor James Moriarty committed suicide!” Holmes says, and his voice is so cold and so hard, and Russell sees for a minute the man that must have stood at the falls, all half death-wish and truth and a heart hardened against everything but the smallest spark of humanity, and then _she_ brings the gun up, her resolve finally broken, and Holmes is lunging forward and Mary throws the ink bottle at Donleavy’s hand and they are wrestling, wrestling, the three of them locked together, and Russell realises that this is what it must have been like, wrestling and half-wishing for it to be over, wishing to be drawn over the edge and carry the darkness down with her, and then there is a shot, and another, and something gray crowds in at the edge of her vision, and the last thing she sees is Holmes bending over her, pulling at the edges of her shirt, shouting her name, his voice rough, and beyond him Patricia Donleavy’s body, a third eye in the middle of her forehead. Holmes’ voice, with something ragged and soft rattling around in it, his hands. And nothing.

...

Russell sits in the sun a lot, and at night, in the privacy of her room, and attempts the exercises the doctor gave her, exercises designed to restore motion and strength to her weaker right arm. She does not think about returning home. She does not think about returning to Oxford. Next week, she thinks. Holmes is gentle, and even so the little things about him begin to annoy her: his sudden silences and even more sudden laughter, the way his voice sometimes seems too loud in the little room, the way he disappears for days at a time, not bothering to explain himself to her.

Russell takes herself for short walks down the path to the ocean, and even though she is too weak to walk too far Holmes takes this as a hint that she wants to be alone with her thoughts.

She cannot remember how long it has been, and she does not really care, and Holmes looks at her over his book, in the warm darkness of the study, and says “I dream a lot, about it. It is always the same dream. You should not let it bother you.”

She wonders how he knows about her dreams, if he is awake during the night as often as she is.

It is four weeks after the accident, and Russell has started jotting down notes in her notebook ( _grip of hand significantly weakened but functional_ ), and Holmes comes to her and says “I may need to go to France and Italy, for six weeks or so. I will be back before your term begins. Would you care to accompany me?” His voice even, businesslike.

Russell feels herself nod, vacantly. Her arm will be in a sling, probably for two months or more, and she knows that Holmes has a new set of scars on his back, too, and that he sometimes flinches when another man lights a cigarette, and averts his gaze. But that is a story for another time. Holmes sits down on the grass at her side, grunting softly, his knees drawn up close to his chest.

“I want you to share some things with me, Holmes. ”

She can see Watson on the slope ahead of them, smoking, gazing out at the sea. She thinks of the way his hand stole up to rest on the back of Holmes’ collar, to touch the soft, unbrilliantined hairs at the nape of his neck. She thinks of the way Holmes laughs when he is with Watson. She thinks of how much Holmes has been smoking lately, of the slack, drooping look to his eyes. She thinks of how selfish she has been.

“Go ahead,” Holmes says, his voice guarded.

“You need not worry about being demonstrative with Watson in my presence,” Russell says, and Holmes is silent for several seconds. He loads his pipe, and tamps it expertly with a finger, frowning into the bowl the entire time.

“Ours has never been a publicly demonstrative relationship, Russell. Surely you know that. Surely you know why.”

“Yet you never made an effort to hide it from me. And yet we rarely discuss it.”

“There are some situations that cannot be improved by discussion.”

Yes, but very few, Russell thinks, and silence can be so toxic.

“I want your trust, and your partnership, Holmes. I want you to understand that I love you, and that I know you love me, and that I understand. I want you to know that whatever happens, wherever I choose to live or what I choose to do, you will always have my trust and my partnership.”

And she knows then, of course, that like Watson she will be drawn into Holmes’ orbit, that they are now partners, that even if she marries some broken young man and moves to Oxford and sifts through dusty old documents all day, she will share a part of herself with Holmes.

“I understand.”

He sits there beside her, smoking, his forearms resting on his knees.

“For a very long time I thought myself incapable of being loved,” he says, and he pushes himself to his feet and walks off toward the ocean, away from Russell and away from Watson, as well.

...

I killed your father because I loved Watson, and his death gave me almost ten years of sublime happiness with Watson. It has given us almost twenty more years of partnership.

I killed him because I could not stand to see another man like that go on living. Because I was young and I wanted to win.

And I sent you away, Watson, because I wanted to know that you could be happy without me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I let it eat away at me, inside. I’m sorry I came back the way I did, less of a man than I was when I left. I’m sorry about how I was before, how I have always been, moody and impulsive and unstable, but at the same time I am not sorry because I don’t know if I would change it, if I could.

When I was away I’d lay awake at night and form mental lists, with bullet-points and subheadings, of the things I’d have done differently, of all the things I missed. I tortured myself with my failure. I catalogued it so thoroughly, to hurt myself, to remind myself.

After I pushed him over the edge I stood there for a long time, smelling the clean ozone smell of the rising water, listening to the roar, the roar that obliterated everything, and I thought about it. I think that when I did it, _when I hurt myself_ , I thought I was going over the edge twelve years late.

This is what I haven’t said.

...

Five weeks.

Holmes is at his desk, bent over a manuscript copy of his treatise on detecting.

“Holmes,” Russell says, and she repeats his name once more, until he looks up, pencil in his hand.

The fire crackles. She can hear Holmes’ leather desk chair creaking.

“Did Moriarty -- did he --?”

“Did he commit suicide? As I told his daughter? Is that what you’re asking me?”

“Yes.”

“No,” Holmes says. “Although I would have, if I could have taken him with me. It didn't turn out that way.”

He holds her gaze, carefully, unashamed.

“That was what the hospital admission in 1903 was. But you have already half-guessed that, Russell. You want confirmation.”

“Guesses are toxic to the logical faculties,” Russell says. “It most closely fits the available information, as I have seen it.”

Holmes carefully underlines a word, then puts the pencil down on the surface of his desk, gets up, goes and stands before the fire.

“I took an unwise amount of cocaine and then I cut the vein near the inside of my elbow, and then I changed my mind and wrapped it in an old shirtsleeve, as firmly as I could, it was not easy, none of this was easy, and I passed out in a pool of my own blood, and Watson came home and found me, and I remember him crying, and then I was taken to the hospital and given fluids and slapped about the face a lot, and I faded in and out and woke up three days later, feeling the worst I ever had. And then the infection almost killed me. And here I am.”

He crosses his arms, squeezes the biceps of his left arm with his right.

It was very cold, Russell thinks. The fog was suffocating. “Thank you for telling me,” she says, at length.

“Living with you has given me insight into how Watson must have felt, living with me. You are so cold, so ruthless when you know there is an answer. And things are given substance by speaking them aloud, Russell. You know this as I do.”

Russell does not quite know what to say, for the moment, so she stays quiet.

“Would you like to read this latest chapter?”

“Holmes, I’m sorry.”

“I was, at the time. I’m not sorry anymore, Russell. I was barely 40. There were things I did not know about the world, about the capacity that the human body and mind have to go on living.”

Russell watches him, watches him watching the flames. This man, this half-noble, selfish, courageous man, she thinks. What have you survived? What have we both survived?

“Please,” Holmes says, and he turns to her, goes to the desk. “Read it.”

...

THE CAUSES AND PATTERNS OF CRIMINAL ACTIVITY

_INTRODUCTION_

The science of the mind is still in its infancy, but I strongly believe that it will give us huge insights into not only the study of our lives and motivations, but also into the basis and origins of criminology.

Who among us has not thought about doing harm to another person? These thoughts are a part of all of us. Each man carries this unimaginable, unfathomable capacity as a small part of himself. Is it selfishness that turns a man into a criminal? Is it merely opportunity, like the opportunity that a man may take to pick up a forgotten umbrella from an empty train carriage?

None of us are pure and none of us are without blame, but there are those among us who will hurt others, given the chance, who for reasons which may even be obscured to themselves will too easily translate thought into action. This is where evil exists.

There are those among us who have lived violent lives, who have seen evil done and have had evil done to them, and I have had reason to believe that people who have had undue amounts of pain inflicted upon themselves as children are more likely to do this as adults, to others, to themselves. We should pay attention, especially in this time of war, to the violence in our society, and take pains to prevent it becoming a systemic concern. And we should recognise the efforts of those who, through immense self-sacrifice and self-examination, have managed to break the cycle of violence in their own lives.

...

But of course that is not the whole story, Russell, and if I could ever tell you how to tell my story I'd tell you to start and end with a tall thin man standing alone on a hillside, and let them decide for themselves.


End file.
